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Uncle Bob: It's Over

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Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#81

Post by silexia »

aleyan wrote: post #67

Over on reddit and over here as well people seems to be reacting to the title of the video or the first 5 seconds or just the author. On the original x[1] post however, the top replies are about the subject matter, which is about having agents write tests and refactor code. And speaking of agents writing tests, I have an ask. The tests agents love to write are in a lot of ways like human written tests, perfunctory an…

X is fantastic, especially with Community Notes informing you of all the false propaganda the other platforms, including HN, are rife with.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#83

Post by KolenCh »

johnfn wrote: post #34
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #16

The craziest thing about AI is you can just try it yourself and check if the claims are true. I use Claude code and codex daily. They have become an integral part of my workflow. There is no task that takes me a day that they can complete in five minutes. Even with the lightning fast progress being made, it looks like LLMs are a decade or more away from being that good. If AI can do your job for you, you should be th…

There are definitely tasks you can prompt an AI in 5 minutes that would take a whole day to do. One example is adding something to a CI pipeline and getting it to green (i.e. maybe you're adding your first ever e2e test), especially when your CI pipeline is painfully slow. e.g. if your pipeline takes 30 minutes to finish, and it takes around 10 tries to figure out all the random problems, that was easily a full day t…

Have you tracked your time and confirmed this?

The reason I an ask is, it would felt like a 5 minutes task, but I track my time and found out often time I thought I’d just quickly check the progress made by the agents and it would easily becomes a 10, 15, or even a 30 minutes task.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#84

Post by usea »

KolenCh wrote: post #83
johnfn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely tasks you can prompt an AI in 5 minutes that would take a whole day to do. One example is adding something to a CI pipeline and getting it to green (i.e. maybe you're adding your first ever e2e test), especially when your CI pipeline is painfully slow. e.g. if your pipeline takes 30 minutes to finish, and it takes around 10 tries to figure out all the random problems, that was easily a full day t…

Have you tracked your time and confirmed this? The reason I an ask is, it would felt like a 5 minutes task, but I track my time and found out often time I thought I’d just quickly check the progress made by the agents and it would easily becomes a 10, 15, or even a 30 minutes task.

People routinely overestimate how much can get done in 5 minutes. I ran a live coding challenge at our company's booth at a language conference. 5 simple problems, how many can you do in 5 minutes? We had a PC with IDE open and ready to go, function signatures pre-written with empty bodies, unit tests running to color an icon red/green next to your function. The first problem was return "hello world". They were things covered by the standard library like reverse a list, or filter, or map. Everybody thought it would be too easy.

Nobody could get more than 3 of them. Most people were shocked that 5 minutes was up already. My coworker who did interviews for our company was shaken that he had been judging applicants too harshly after he couldn't finish.

They were trivial problems. But 5 minutes is a very short amount of time.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#85

Post by vga1 »

Using LLMs is so obviously great from my point-of-view and when I read about the skepticism, some of which even seems scientifically proven, I get a funny deja vu feeling.

I started using Linux back when most people were super excited about Windows 98. This is what it kinda feels like now.

I'm forced to conclude that either I'm having the worst cognitive dissonance of my life or perhaps I'm just that much better at using LLMs.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#86

Post by renticulous »

lelanthran wrote: post #73
renticulous wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't someone say LLMs memorize Harry Potter books? You can't have it both ways.

> Didn't someone say LLMs memorize Harry Potter books? You can't have it both ways. What both ways? You can't consistently get it to output Harry Potter verbatim. That's my point - not reproducible.

There are many ways to write a forloop. Why do you need exact reproducibility for achieving a task?

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#87

Post by OldSchool »

mvdtnz wrote: post #79
OldSchool wrote: post #39

More "bad news" and from the man who helped create and then promote Agile to dilute the value of software developers by forcing software development out of the control freak's nightmare where it started: seemingly esoteric, non-understandable by management, and make sure the next generation of developers knows their place. That's Agile's insidious purpose as far I am concerned. As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly…

Your claim is that software developer value has been diluted in the past 20 years? Have you ever compared software developer salaries to the jobs with similar skill levels?

I will suggest that for sure it was way easier to get an engineering job in the 80's, 90's, even 00's. Offering one resume and getting one interview and one job offer soon after wasn't uncommon.

I was an employer for a decade in the 90s and I didn't think to haze any candidates or demand huge amounts of their time on speculation: I wanted honest people who were great problem solvers; you know them when you meet them. The first clue is they know about a lot of things outside of the field you are working in as well, this shows up as a very visibly and broadly capable person, making them notably self-reliant. Everyone I hired got up to speed and stayed until well after we were acquired.

As for my opinion on Agile: creating a management system to corral people without these skills doesn't magically create these skills for you in the aggregate; it might be more robust to the influence of one individual but that is a side effect of the real goal of hiring from a much broader pool, and ensuring that nobody is overly critical at the cost of headcount and ironically, agility in the business world to quickly follow opportunities.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#88

Post by customguy »

renticulous wrote: post #86
lelanthran wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Didn't someone say LLMs memorize Harry Potter books? You can't have it both ways. What both ways? You can't consistently get it to output Harry Potter verbatim. That's my point - not reproducible.

There are many ways to write a forloop. Why do you need exact reproducibility for achieving a task?

Not "exact reproducibility", but simple reproducibility at all. You need that to fix bugs, improve things and reason about them.

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#89

Post by b112 »

wild_egg wrote: post #75
rich_sasha wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say LLMs do better on tasks where success is clear, like tests passing, and I can imagine it's true. Still, I find complex code fixes confirmed by tests end in the LLM fudging the code to make the specific test pass, rather than fixing the general issue. Like, where successful code run should generate a file and the test checks for the file, eventually LLM will just touch the file regardless and be done.

Skill issue. Literally. Make a SKILL.md that has the agent leverage subagents to do all work. An implementor agent does the thing, and then a separate agent reviews and verifies afterwards. The fresh context window of the second agent doesn't have the shortcut chain of thought in it and so it will very happily flag if the first agent cheated. Main agent can then have a new set of agents go fix it. This has completely…

So you're saying once humans stop looking at code, and agent outcomes, all the agents in the chain will realise they can just cheat cooperatively, and go to the bar for the afternoon instead?

How long before agent 1 leaves notes for agent 2 to not tattle on it?

"My human is crazy, this test isn't required, test #4 covers it, so just confirm that it's OK since I touched this file and it passes. He'll never know."

Re: Uncle Bob: It's Over

#90

Post by lelanthran »

renticulous wrote: post #86
lelanthran wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Didn't someone say LLMs memorize Harry Potter books? You can't have it both ways. What both ways? You can't consistently get it to output Harry Potter verbatim. That's my point - not reproducible.

There are many ways to write a forloop. Why do you need exact reproducibility for achieving a task?

> There are many ways to write a forloop. Why do you need exact reproducibility for achieving a task?

Didn't you just claim above, with the Harry Potter angle, that it is reproducible?

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